20 Things You Didn’t Know About The Spy Who Loved Me (1977)
14. “It Was You Who Betrayed Me.”
The Spy Who Loved Me clearly recycles some ideas from Lewis Gilbert’s previous Bond film, You Only Live Twice.
One of these is Stromberg's murder of his assistant (Marilyn Galsworthy), who aims to sell a microfilm of his submarine tracking system to the highest bidder, which is a partial remake of Blofeld's (Donald Pleasence's) punishment of Helga Brandt (Karin Dor) in the earlier film.
Inviting her to leave their sumptuous dinner whilst he talks business with Dr. Bechmann and Professor Markovitz, Stromberg sends her plunging down a lift shaft into a shark tank in the bowels of Atlantis. He then watches, fascinated, via CCTV whilst his pet Great White shark eagerly devours her.
To shoot the sequence, Marilyn Galsworthy was dropped into a water tank on a soundstage at Pinewood Studios, whilst the underwater shots were filmed by a camera operator, Lamar Boren [who had previously worked on Thunderball (1965) and You Only Live Twice] with a stuntwoman and a trained shark in a saltwater swimming pool in Nassau, The Bahamas.
A similar technique was used for the scene in which Jaws kills the shark after Double-0 Seven later dumps him in the tank.